Building something to cut through the noise
We launched a software tool to help investors track winning stocks.
The hardest part of investing is figuring out how to ignore 90% of the information out there.
As a financial reporter I’ve met or interviewed hundreds of market strategists, economists and portfolio managers. One thing I’ve learned is that while everyone is drowning in data, the best investors are the ones with the best filters.
In portfolio management — as in life — success is mostly a question of how clearly you can see.
With my newsletter and show, I contribute an unusual amount to the morass of information that hits the internet.
Since I can’t speak to the personal situations of every investor, by definition that means some of the work I’m producing is indeed “noise” to a portion of the audience.
That’s where the cold discipline of software comes in.
On Friday, our team at Opening Bell Daily launched a new AI-powered investment dashboard to better serve our Best Ideas Club members.
The goal was not to give people more information to comb, but to provide a clean, intuitive tool to help see through the fog.
Ideally, this platform contributes less to the noise and stands in as a useful filter.
Now, for each of the weekly high-conviction stock picks I write about, members can log on to the dashboard to generate charts, key takeaways and risks for various investments with a single click.
For example, this chart below covers a stock we published last August.
It’s up 114% since then.
We have countless other stock picks that have performed even better than that one.
To be sure, I’ll be the first to admit that I haven’t had to spearhead a software product before.
AI agents and YouTube tutorials made the process smoother than it would have been a year or two ago, but finalizing it for launch was nonetheless a grueling test of humility and patience.
When you’re a small and lean team, you don’t have an IT department or quality assurance wing. Just a couple people working early mornings and late nights to solve problems and squash bugs.
Now that I’m on the other side of launch, though, I can recognize that this is one of the most engaging projects I’ve worked on.
The work itself is compelling to me. But the other component here is that I’ve felt a specific kind of magic in moving from describing a problem to engineering an elegant solution for it.
This presented both a technical and creative challenge that were a world apart from the usual editorial or business decisions I make each day.
To no surprise, building a filter is far more difficult than contributing to the noise.
I’ll still be in inboxes and on screens more often than some people prefer, but I’m proud that I’m now behind something that also helps people tune me — and everything else — out when it matters most.
Talk to you soon,
Phil Rosen
Co-founder of Opening Bell Daily | Host of Full Signal
If you want to join Best Ideas Club and access our new product, send me an email (philrosen4355@gmail.com) and I will send you a private 20% off discount code reserved for readers of this blog.